What I've Been Reading | April 2023
Seneca, Ancient Chinese Philosophy, and Aphorisms
Hi – my name’s Caleb. I’m one of the founder’s of Stoa and have a background in academic philosophy and startups. Welcome to my newsletter.
And here’s a list of what I’ve been reading in April 2023.
📖 The Madness of Hercules by Seneca
Dana Gioia translates Seneca's play into elegant prose. I wouldn’t recommend immediately jumping into it, unless you have a keen interest in Seneca’s plays – which perhaps you should. If you’d like to learn more about the life of the philosopher, playwright, and statesman James Romm’s Dying Every Day is an excellent biography. If you’ve never read any Seneca, check out his Moral Letters (links below).
📖 Lysis by Plato
A Socratic dialogue about the meaning of friendship. A remark from the Loeb Introduction captures the mood best:
Indeed one might say that, in one aspect of the dialogue, the mere tone of Socrates towards the boys is itself a lesson in friendship.
– W. R. M. Lamb, Plato: Lysis. Symposium. Gorgias. (Loeb Classical Library No. 166)
📖 The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life by Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh
A fine introduction to ancient Chinese philosophy from a self-help lens. In innocent prose, it contains deep challenges to common western ideas of individualism, power, and reason.
What we in the West define as the true self is actually patterns of continuous responses to people and the world; patterns that have built up over time. For example, you might think, I’m just the kind of person who gets annoyed easily. On the contrary, it’s more likely that you have become the kind of person who does get irritated over minor things because of how you’ve interacted with people for years. But that’s not because you are, in fact, such a person. By being loyal to a “true self,” you ended up concretizing destructive emotional habits.
– Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh, The Path
📖 The Bed of Procrustes by Nassim Taleb
I truly believe that Taleb is one of the philosophers of this age. In this book, his high-variance aphorisms touch on randomness, noise, and intensity of the age. Plenty of them are not good. But many are incisive observations, pithy putdowns, and properly challenging. Here are a few:
📖 Letters from a Stoic by Seneca
The Penguin translation of Seneca’s Moral Letters. It’s a classic work, written to advise a fellow Roman.
I wrote about ideas from his second letter here.
You can also find a fine and free translation of Seneca's moral letters on Wikipedia.
🐦️ From Twitter
Twitter apparently doesn’t let Substack show Twitter previews anymore. Go here to view the previews for each tweet.
https://twitter.com/_MikeTremblay/status/1651209539348201472
https://twitter.com/_MikeTremblay/status/1651209539348201472
https://twitter.com/sachinmaini/status/1649522904869249024
https://twitter.com/calebwatney/status/1649083046677692416
https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1648438422028312578
https://twitter.com/nabeelqu/status/1644142789775753216
Let me know if you pick any of these up or share what you’ve read this month.